Off to Be the Wizard - 2 - Spell or High Water

by Scott Meyer

  “But Florida’s not very wide,” Murphy said. “You’re never that far from an interstate. An escapee could be two states away by nightfall.”

  The voice on the phone said, “If a prisoner did manage to escape, they’d have a choice. Face the swamp, or travel through towns.

  “If they choose the swamp,” he continued, “they get to deal with alligators that are dangerous enough to kill and eat a man, and snakes dangerous enough to kill him without eating him, which if you think about it is kind of a bigger insult. It’s bad enough to die, but it would be worse to also go to waste.”

  Murphy said that he agreed, although he wasn’t sure that he did.

  The voice on the phone continued. “If the escapee stuck to well-traveled roadways and towns, they’d face an even greater danger. Floridians. Law-abiding Floridians suspect that any stranger they meet might be a violent criminal. They trust nobody, and they call the police at the drop of a hat. To a Floridian, 911 is like an electronic lottery ticket. If they report you and you turn out to be a wanted felon, they might get a reward. If they report you and you’re not wanted, they still get to watch you get questioned by the police. The only way to lose is to not be the first person to call the cops. It’s a race to see who can dial 911 the fastest, and the prize for second place is a ride in a squad car.”

  Murphy wasn’t buying it. “I’m not sure—”

  “Don’t interrupt,” the disembodied voice on the phone said, interrupting him. Just because Murphy wasn’t buying it didn’t mean the voice had to stop selling it. “And furthermore, if that’s how dangerous the law-abiding citizens are, you can imagine how treacherous the criminals would be. There’s no honor among thieves, and even less among Floridians. If a criminal finds an escaped convict, they see the perfect victim. They can rob him of whatever he’s managed to steal with impunity, because what’s he going to do, call the police? And if he hasn’t managed to steal any money, clothes, or a car yet, you can just befriend him, help him steal all of those things, then take them yourself later. Agent Murphy, if I escaped from a prison in south Florida, I’d try to swim to Cuba. At least sharks play fair and the communists are up front about taking everything you own.”

  This was a lot to absorb at 3:00 A.M., and Agent Murphy had almost forgotten what they were talking about in the first place. The voice reminded him, telling him that he was to report alone to the front gate of the prison at 3:00 P.M. eastern time in two days, and that he’d be allowed to meet with the prisoner, Todd Douglas, for exactly twenty minutes.

  Murphy, Miller, and Jimmy scrambled to make a plan, then they scrambled to execute it. By the time they were done, Murphy barely had time to make it to his flight. The Treasury had approved the expenditure to pay for his travel, but, as always, they made the arrangements with an eye toward saving their money, not his time. There are direct flights from Los Angeles to Miami, but Agent Murphy’s itinerary had three legs and layovers in Minneapolis and Seattle (because fate has a sense of humor), before landing in Jacksonville, at the far end of the state from where he needed to be. Agent Murphy told his supervisor that this was a massive waste of his time. His supervisor replied that Agent Murphy was paid a salary, so his time was the agency’s to waste.

  The flights were awful, and the drive had been worse. Several times he had driven through swarms of black insects that died in such large numbers, and in such a gruesome fashion, that it made it impossible to see through the windshield. Every rest area and gas station had lines of bug-splattered cars waiting to use a hose. The first time he stopped to clean the car had been seriously unpleasant. The nose of his silver rental car looked like it had been scorched during reentry, but the black streaks weren’t burn marks, they were bug corpses. The car reeked of death. He used the dirtiest squeegee he’d ever seen to clean as much of the windshield as he could without throwing up. He got back in the car, got back on the freeway, and within fifteen minutes drove through another swarm that obscured his vision all over again.

  By the time he reached his destination, Agent Murphy longed for his days in the boxcar full of squeaky toys, but he made it. Murphy thought he was going to see a prison, but when he arrived he found a perfectly mundane, if over-sized industrial park. The front of the closest building was a long row of office entrances. He saw an unbroken line of tinted windows, tinted glass doors, and uninspiring signs with names like Fan-rific Industrial Venting Solutions, and logos that were capital letters tilted to the side to look like they were moving quickly, or leaning over, partially melted in the Florida heat, which seemed more likely. The building had probably been beige at first, but prolonged exposure to the Florida sun had left it a dirty eggshell color. Behind the one-story office fronts there were larger two-story structures that looked like the standard industrial park storage/workshop/loading dock, multi-use business space. The whole property was surrounded by a cyclone fence topped with vicious-looking razor wire.

  Murphy drove up to the security booth, where a dull-eyed old man in a faded uniform slouched on a stool, watching a small TV. Murphy sat in his idling car, trying to ignore the oppressive heat and the smell of baked bug guts rising off of his car in almost visible waves. The guard glanced at Agent Murphy without turning his head. He sighed, then slid the window open so he could talk to this man who had the audacity to interrupt his stories.

  The security guard said, “Wadja want?”

  Murphy held up his badge and said, “I’m Agent Duane Murphy from the U.S. Department of the Treasury. I have an appointment.”

  The guard nodded, then looked down at a clipboard on the shelf next to his TV. His finger trailed down the document, then stopped sharply. The guard sat straight up, turned crisply to Agent Murphy, and smiled. He instantly seemed ten years younger and twenty pounds lighter.

  The guard said, “We’re expecting you, Agent Murphy. Come right in. Warden Brookes is waiting at the visitors’ entrance. It’s the fourth door down, labeled My Shirt-List Novelty Tees.” He slid the window closed and raised the orange and white striped arm so Murphy could enter.

  Murphy found the door. The logo was a drawing of a T-shirt with a capital T in an overly decorative font. He parked, got out of the car, and pushed the car door closed with one finger, pressing on one of the few surfaces of the car that wasn’t streaked with sticky dried bug juice.

  Murphy walked into the nondescript office entrance and was shocked at what he found inside: exactly what you’d expect.

  A dropped-tile ceiling and fluorescent lights hung above off-white stucco walls and low-pile, high-traffic carpet. A metal faux wood grain desk and a black plastic desk chair were the only furnishings. The desk was covered with paperwork, a red stapler, and a black multiline phone. The only other door was behind the desk. It looked to be hollow core, and probably weighed about eight ounces. It had a cheap, shiny brass doorknob. The room reeked of dust and failure, which was better than humidity and dead bugs, but only a little.

  Murphy had been inside less than five seconds when the door swung open. A man in a beautifully tailored black pinstriped suit entered. He was average height with thinning black hair. He looked like the kind of man who would play the president in a 1950s movie about giant wasps. He stepped forward, thrust out his hand, and said, “Agent Murphy, I’m Warden Brooks. Welcome to The Facility.”

  Murphy shook his hand, and asked, “It certainly is quite a . . . facility. I just realized that nobody’s ever told me what this place is called.”

  Warden Brooks said, “I just told you, Agent Murphy. It’s called The Facility.”

  “Yes, I understand that that’s what you call it, but what’s its official name?”

  Warden Brooks smiled, but clearly had been through this conversation many times before, and derived no pleasure from it. “This facility’s name, Agent Murphy, is The Facility. Any time anybody refers to The Facility in any capacity, official or unofficial, they refer to it as The Facility.”
/>
  “What kind of name is that?”

  “The kind that confuses people and makes them sound either stupid or crazy. It is, in short, the perfect name for this kind of . . . facility. Please follow me.” With that, Warden Brooks walked out through the flimsy door he had used to enter. Murphy followed.

  The cheap door led from the shabby office to a crummy hall. One side of the hall held two more faux-veneer hollow-core doors and too-shiny doorknobs. One had a drab brown plastic sign that said Men; the other had a similar sign that said Ladies.

  Warden Brooks walked to the unmarked door at the end of the hall, but paused before opening it. “You need to use the restroom?”

  Murphy said, “No.”

  “Good. We deliberately keep those bathrooms dirty and short of toilet paper. We must keep up appearances.” The warden led Murphy onward through the door. Every characteristic changed. The hard carpeting was replaced with slightly softer-looking concrete floors. The stucco was displaced with painted cinderblock. The suspended acoustic ceiling was now exposed metal trusses and ductwork. The design aesthetic had changed from the kind of cheap that falls apart immediately to the kind of cheap that lasts forever.

  The warden walked quickly and talked at the same pace, forcing Murphy to struggle physically and mentally to keep up. They passed through an endless maze of identical concrete walls and steel doors, interspersed with the occasional staircase and wrought-iron gate controlled by people in uniforms protected behind thick impact-resistant glass. Murphy never got a good look at any of these people, because they never stopped walking. The gates swung open before the warden arrived. They did this with such reliability that a few times Murphy thought Brooks was going to walk face first into the bars, but the bars always got out of the way before that happened.

  “The Facility was created at an undisclosed point in the past,” the warden said, “for an agency that is classified, by a president who shall remain nameless.” He barely turned his head to the side to speak to Murphy as he walked. “The purpose of The Facility is to house the nation’s most problematic prisoners.”

  “By problematic, you mean violent and dangerous,” Agent Murphy said, finally feeling like he was getting a handle on the situation.

  Warden Brooks said, “No. I said ‘problematic,’ and that’s what I meant. The prison system doesn’t consider violence much of a problem. They deal with it all the time. If prisons had a problem dealing with violence, the prisoners would just fight their way out of prison and we’d all have a problem, and violence, before too long. No. We get the prisoners that nobody else knows what to do with. Take your man, Todd Douglas. Do you know what he did to get here?”

  Murphy didn’t know, as it happened. He took a wild guess, based on his knowledge of Jimmy’s other associates. “Embezzling?”

  The warden laughed. “You’re a Treasury agent, that’s right. It’s all embezzlement and tax evasion to you guys. Well, he might have embezzled too, but what got him here was killing a man. The victim was his boss at one of those strip mall video game stores. Do you know how he killed him?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yeah, well, neither do we. Well, we do, but we don’t. That’s one of the things that makes your guy problematic. We know what he did, and we know why, but we can’t explain how he actually did it.”

  Murphy was lost. “How’s that work? If you know he killed the guy, you have to be able to explain how.”

  “He made all of the atoms in his boss’s body lose their molecular bonds at the same time. Can you explain how he did that? Is that something the Treasury deals with routinely? No, I didn’t think so.”

  “If you don’t know how he did it, how can you know that he did it?”

  “Because he had a beef with his boss, because he tried to evade capture, and because of all the people who worked at the video game store inside a mall in Phoenix, in August, he was the only one who came to work wearing galoshes.”

  Murphy said, “Ick.”

  The warden nodded. “Damn straight, ick. The entire carpet was destroyed, every square inch of it. Whole thing got confiscated by the government for study. It’s probably rolled up and sitting next to the Ark of the Covenant by now.”

  Murphy said, “If he’s that dangerous, I can see why they’d send him to a place like this.”

  The warden shook his head. “No, you’re making too many assumptions. We don’t know how he liquefied that guy, but we’ve seen no evidence that he can still do it. We’ve had him here for six years, and he hasn’t hurt a fly. Mr. Douglas is here for two reasons. One is that we can’t explain what he did, how he escaped capture at first, or how he was captured in the end. The police got called and they immediately started questioning him. He was pretty cocky until they started asking about the galoshes, then he got nervous. He excused himself, went into a restroom that had no exits beyond the one door the cops were guarding, and he never came out.”

  “That’s something,” Murphy said. He chose not to share the story about how Martin Banks had disappeared right before his eyes.

  The warden continued. “Yeah, well the weird part was at that exact moment, he turns up in the lobby of Phoenix City Hall, stark naked and hog-tied, and get this, his hair was longer and he had a beard.”

  Jimmy hadn’t told Murphy much about this Todd character. He now suspected he was going to have a long conversation with Jimmy about him. For now, Murphy just said, “That’s pretty weird, all right.”

  “Yeah, well, you should be grateful,” Warden Brooks said. “The only reason we’re letting you see the little weasel is that we’re hoping that it will lead to some answers.”

  Murphy chose not to comment. Instead he changed the subject. “You said there were two reasons he’s here.”

  “Yeah, you’ll see.”

  The two men walked in silence through a few more twists and turns of the corridor. Murphy hoped the warden would lead him back out, or else he’d never find his way to daylight again, and might end up just getting a job there. Finally they rounded the last corner and approached the last gate. Where Murphy would have expected to see another electronically actuated lock, the gate was instead held fast with a very large, very old-looking mechanical lock. Several feet before the gate a guard sat on a stool, guarding a single, oversized key that hung from a spike driven into the mortar between the cinderblocks in the wall.

  Murphy got the pleasure of surprising the warden with his lack of surprise. “Oh, his magnetic field is the other thing, eh?”

  The warden scowled. “You knew about that?”

  Agent Murphy said, “Yes.” They eyeballed each other for a moment. It was clear that there was a battle for dominance going on, and that up until a second ago, Warden Brooks was certain he was winning. Murphy, as was his way, had won the whole game by pretending not to play until the last few seconds.

  Agent Murphy had walked into this meeting knowing exactly two things about Todd beyond his name. He withheld the information about the magnetic field until after Warden Brooks shared a great deal of new information, and in doing so, gave the impression that he already knew much of what Brooks had told him, and had been humoring him. The other thing Agent Murphy knew he had already decided he could never share, because he didn’t really believe it. Jimmy had told him that Todd had traveled in time to the distant past and had been rejected and sent back by Jimmy and all of the other time travelers.

  The warden grumbled under his breath as he removed his watch and cell phone, placing them on a small table next to the locked gate. Murphy did the same. When all electronic devices were safely removed, the guard opened the gate and let them through.

  The cinderblock hallway that stretched on beyond the gate was structurally identical to the hallway before, but felt entirely different. The overhead fluorescent light fixtures were dark. Instead, bare incandescent light bulbs hung from the ceiling at regular intervals. T
heir cords stretched up to the ceiling, where they looked to have been hastily stapled in place. The cords led to the wall, then down to the floor, then back, along the floorboards and through the gate they’d just passed, finally terminating in a cheap power strip plugged into the wall outlet. The hanging lights were dimmer than the fluorescents, and swung slightly in the breeze, making the shadows wobble unnervingly.

  Their footsteps echoed as the warden walked down the hall and around the corner. Murphy followed, and finally laid eyes on Todd Douglas.

  Murphy saw a prison cell. The only furniture was a toilet and a bed. The only light came from more poorly hung light bulbs dangling outside the cell, well beyond the prisoner’s reach.

  The back wall of the cell was stacked from the floor to about waist-height with books, most of them so thin as to barely qualify as anything more than a magazine. A man in an orange jumpsuit sat on the bed, reading a skinny book with a glossy cover. The back of the book had a drawing of a little girl and a man in a diving suit.

  The warden barked, “Douglas, get up. You have a visitor.”

  The prisoner slammed the book shut and turned to face Agent Murphy. He had a weak chin, a strong nose, dark hair, and bright eyes. Todd rose to his feet. His movements were slow, but his eyes darted around, taking in every detail of his visitors so voraciously that Agent Murphy almost felt violated.

  Todd grabbed the bars of his cell and leaned forward, almost placing his head between the bars, as if trying to get as close to the other two men as possible. “Hello, I’m Todd Douglas. Thank you for coming to visit me.”

  Murphy stood tall and said, “I’m not here for pleasure, Mr. Douglas.”

  “Oh, but having you here is a pleasure for me,” the prisoner said. “I see some of the guards every day, and I see Warden Brooks here about once a month, but other than that I never get any visitors. What’s your name?”